Chisel logo  Computer Human Interaction & Software Engineering Lab

PromptViz

The field of knowledge engineering is an important area of computer science. Parts of the medical community are already reliant on ontologies and knowledge engineering systems to maintain and evolve large controlled medical terminologies and the Semantic Web will rely on ontologies. Representation standards such as OWL and development tools like Protégé have begun to emerge, but are not at the same maturity level as software engineering tools. Currently the tools to support version control and change representation are particularly lacking for ontology development. As ontologies become more pervasive, the need for tools that can help with change representation will become heightened.


Click to enlarge...

PromptViz screenshot (click to enlarge...)

Our tool, called PROMPTViz, creates visual representations of the differences between two versions of an ontology. PROMPTViz uses treemap layouts and a zooming user interface to provide efficient overviews of the differences between large ontologies yet not obscure the details. Our motivating example has been the National Cancer Institute Thesaurus, which contains detailed information about cancer research field, but as PROMPTViz is a plug-in for the popular Protégé knowledge engineering environment, it can be used with any ontology that Protégé can load.

Investigator: David Perrin

PromptViz - Download & Install

Pre-requisites

  • Protege 3.1 (with Prompt) - Download the "full" version of Protege and choose "Everything" or "Custom" during installation to make sure the Prompt plug-in is installed. If you do not have Java 1.4.2 JRE installed, or are in doubt, download a version of Protege that "includes Java VM."

To Install

  1. Download promptviz_1_0_3.zip
  2. Unzip it into your "protege\plugins" directory. Ex. C:\Program Files\Protege_3.1\plugins\

To Use

  1. Start, or restart, Protege
  2. Open a project and turn on the Prompt and PromptViz tabs via Project > Configure... > Tab Widgets
  3. Do a "compare" with Prompt (see the Prompt documentation for more details.)
  4. Switch to the PromptViz tab and wait a few seconds. You should see the results of Prompt's "compare" in PromptViz.

Feedback

Send any bug reports, comments, suggestions to chisel-support@cs.uvic.ca